“... central to their ideas of modern art. They were meat and drink to Whitman, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who wrote of a world delivered from ‘traditions regarding style and the right subjects to be handled’, and of an ‘emancipation of the intellect by modern science and the enfranchisement of the individual by new political ...”

“... often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first ...”

“... a year before the encounter between Berdach and Freud, the German psychoanalyst and neurologist John Rittmeister returned from Switzerland to Germany to complete his training analysis – at considerable risk, since he was known to the authorities for his communist sympathies. Appointed director of the Göring Institute, the skeleton psychoanalytic ...”

“... Abbey and carted off the Stone of Scone. No one in Scotland seems in the least impressed with John Major’s imaginative gesture: they’ve got more sense, though with the relic up for grabs there was an undignified scramble between various venues wanting it for its commercial and tourist potential. In this sense it’s very much in the tradition of all ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... of the Danube’, which details Sartre’s foray into film-making: his abortive collaboration with John Huston on a screenplay about Freud. Roudinesco begins by situating Huston’s choice of Sartre as screenwriter within the context of America’s hygienisation, medicalisation and corruption of psychoanalysis. Apparently, the one oasis in America where ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... on her lap. At a gathering of British psychoanalysts, students and academics organised by John Forrester in the 1980s the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche asked why there are no artistic representations of the erotic pleasure a mother gains in breastfeeding her child. Behind that question was another one. Why does the psychoanalytic representation ...”

“... with Cameron’s description of this as a ‘slight fall’. After the letters were published, John McDonnell hailed the prime minister as a convert to the anti-austerity cause. The unedifying spectacle of a prime minister ignorant of the impact of his own government’s policies, or so taken in by his ministers’ rhetoric that he could not reconcile ...”

“... of those who wished it so. They had lived through what complacent historians in the West like John Lewis Gaddis called the ‘Long Peace’ of postwar Europe, but which for them was an unbroken long war of fifty years, starting with the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states in August 1939, before Hitler attacked Poland, and ending only with the fall of the ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... collection links up with the superficially very different, and better, translation (published by John Fuller’s Sycamore Press) which the even younger Larkin, painstakingly following Eliot and other Modernists, took from Baudelaire’s ‘Femmes Damnées’ – the Larkin poem a fascinatingly talented if odd attempt to fuse the ‘French’ or ...”

“... special interests and ignorance. Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of ...”